Barry cracks me the hell up. Years of ID defense, and whose ramblings get him off....fucking Pascal.

Barry thinks ID has detected the design in nature, and he quotes Pascal, who in prelude to his 'wager' says this:

"This is what I see, and what troubles me. I look on all sides, and everywhere I see nothing but obscurity. Nature offers me nothing that is not a matter of doubt and disquiet. .... For after all what is man in nature? A nothing in relation to infinity, all in relation to nothing, a central point between nothing and all and infinitely far from understanding either.... There no doubt exist natural laws, but once this fine reason of ours was corrupted, it corrupted everything"

And there is a non-zero chance of infinite life (heaven), so why not believe? Oh, but what if that God requires child sacrifice? Well shit, its a non-zero chance, so here we go...

But Barry reminds us, much like ID, logic only applies to HIS version of god....

Quote

Boiled down, the unstated assumption of the Wager is that when we say “God exists” by “God” we mean the God described in the Bible. As long as there is a non-zero chance that that God exists the wager holds.

Funny some fundamentalist types use the same logic when blowing themselves up to get their 72 virgins in paradise....isn't ANYTHING worth eternal salvation?

Funny also that the lovers of Pascal forget he died in a ascetic heretic cult as a crazed 39 year old, flagellating himself and pressing skin with necklaces of thorns, denying himself the food and medicine that could have saved him, abandoning an amazing but too brief career in science and technology. No harm in belief???

Funny also that the lovers of Pascal forget he died in a ascetic heretic cult as a crazed 39 year old, flagellating himself and pressing skin with necklaces of thorns, denying himself the food and medicine that could have saved him, abandoning an amazing but too brief career in science and technology. No harm in belief???

I would like to point Barry and the other UDers who are enamored of Pascal's Wager to the last five words of Luke 10:37.

Boiled down, the unstated assumption of the Wager is that when we say “God exists” by “God” we mean the God described in the Bible. As long as there is a non-zero chance that that God exists the wager holds.

There is a non-zero chance that Satan exists and God doesn't, so fall down and worship Satan, Barry!

It’s all too easy for you to promote such an idea. You haven’t the intellectual integrity to actually face criticism (at least not here). You shelter your position from criticism by deliberately refusing to engage it. And when you criticize other’s positions you substitute their positions with arguments of you own making – then attack those arguments instead. You make yourself impenetrable to evidence and reason, and in the process, you become the worst kind of ideologue. - Upright Biped

Funny also that the lovers of Pascal forget he died in a ascetic heretic cult as a crazed 39 year old, flagellating himself and pressing skin with necklaces of thorns, denying himself the food and medicine that could have saved him, abandoning an amazing but too brief career in science and technology. No harm in belief???

I would like to point Barry and the other UDers who are enamored of Pascal's Wager to the last five words of Luke 10:37.

Furthermore it assumes that their creator of the universe would not be able to see past their little charade.

If you are dumb I guess you just assume everybody else is as dumb as you.

Hey, Barry. You dumb!

--------------I also mentioned that He'd have to give me a thorough explanation as to *why* I must "eat human babies".FTK

if there are even critical flaws in Gauger’s work, the evo mat narrative cannot standGordon Mullings

A letter handwritten by physicist Albert Einstein, expressing his views on religion, is to be sold on eBay this month.

Known as the God Letter, the correspondence offers insights into the private thoughts about religion, God and tribalism of one of the world's most brilliant minds.

The LA-based auction agency handling the sale said the letter, written a year before Einstein's death, is expected to fetch much more than the opening bid of $3 million (€2.3m).

Auction Cause President Eric Gazin said: "This letter, in my opinion, is really of historical and cultural significance as these are the personal and private thoughts of arguably the smartest man of the 20th century.

"The letter was written near the end of his life, after a lifetime of learning and thought," he added.

Einstein wrote the letter in German on 3 January, 1954, on Princeton University letterhead to philosopher Eric Gutkind after he read Gutkind's book, Choose Life: The Biblical Call to Revolt.

"The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation, no matter how subtle, can (for me) change this," wrote the German-born scientist, who in 1921 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics.

The anonymous seller of the letter, which will be auctioned with the original envelope, stamp and postmark, purchased it from Bloomsbury Auctions in London in 2008 for $404,000 (€312,000).

Since that time, the letter has been stored in a temperature-controlled vault at a public institution.

Mr Gazin said he expects the letter will fetch double or triple the $3m amount during the 8-18 October auction.

The last major Einstein letter sold for more than $2m (€1.5m) ten years ago

On his blog (http://kairosfocus.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/breaking-fly-montserrat-air-crash.html) he takes it on himself to repeat news-as-it-happens about a tragic plane crash on Antigua. No harm in that, even though one can't help but feel he's more interested in being self-important than in doing a service to anyone.

And even though I have no doubt that local news channels did a better job of reportage, and are seen by rather more people than would be prepared to suffer Mullings' insufferably patronising style for more than 10 seconds.

But he just can't help inserting this gem:

Quote

PS: I have deliberately built this report around an initial item and updates as they flowed in, so that the reader can see how news develops, how multiple sources come in with diverse, divergent details, and how core facts can be true even as details diverge then converge. Notice in particular how the time of the crash clusters around two points in time, and in the end reverts to the 4 pm number of the second report based on convergence of multiple sources. This pattern of breaking news and reports with a convergent core and circumstantial secondary details that are diverse and perhaps partly conflicting or at least hard to reconcile is a well known pattern of truthful and independent, witness-based reports on events. The pattern is instantly familiar to anyone who has studied the breaking news aspect of the resurrection narratives in the NT across that first Easter, and it is also a feature of the tests for verisimilitude of testimony highlighted by Simon Greenleaf in his The Testimony of the Evangelists. We should make use of this pattern as a part of our ability to assess credible, well warranted truth and differentiate it from spin-based manipulated fiction.

Joe, kindly adjust your tone. I notice that once the int3ensity of terms you use ratchets up, you slip off the wagon. You do not need to be more than substantive to make some very good points. Let those who choose to be abusive be that, not you. (And BTW, you used a suspicious term that I do not understand about fingers; I suggest you back away from questionable terms. KINDLY, TURN DOWN THE VOLTAGE NOW. kf

That is a cool depiction of the shrub of life. Thanks for sharing, oldman.

As I understand KF's concepts of body plans and islands of functionality, there must be spots in that shrub where evolution as it is generally understood (that is, without interference from a designer) could not have traveled the path that the chart indicates.

Even if he rejects the entire shrub for other reasons, say the "unreliability" of dating methods, those concepts imply that there must be some impossibilities in the shrub.

I'm pretty sure he would place the unbridgeable gap somewhere between molecules and man. Has he ever narrowed it down further?

Where is the spot where evolution says that one body plan birthed another?

Perhaps only "additional" ID research will make it possible to narrow it down.

--------------Speaking for myself, I have long been confused . . .-Denyse O'Leary

Yet another hysterical rant from KF. You can tell that he desperately wants to ban me or demand an apology.

I half expect him to unban me just so he can have the satisfaction of rebanning me or censoring my comments.

post it so i don't have to go there to read it!

Quote

The design inference is very simple, based on the premise that empirical, inductive explanations of the deep unobserved past or the like, are based on traces we observe and known empirically reliable causes that give rise to the same type of result. So, for instance we know on billions of cases that FSCO/I is a reliable sign of design as key cause. Indeed, the only observed cause, never mind ever so many dubious attempts to cloud the issue. genetic algorithms, from the very statement of a fitness function that points uphill start in a target zone and are chock full of the information built into such. The challenge is to get to such an island of function in a vast sea of configs that quickly exhaust cosmos scale resources without hardly sampling the space of possibilities.

That's the only bit you need to read.

I'm still not sure whether he's thoroughly dishonest or stupidly uncomprehending, or both.

Ineducable, certainly

"The challenge is to get to such an island of function in a vast sea of configs that quickly exhaust cosmos scale resources without hardly sampling the space of possibilities."

So then, according to gordo, it must also be impossible for tiny insects or plant seeds to get to an island thousands of miles out to sea unless they're deliberately sent and guided to that particular island by an intelligent designer yhwh.

ETA:

Think about how big the universe is. What are the odds of meteoroids, asteroids, comets, moons, planets, and/or stars colliding with each other in all that space? Yet it happens, a lot. gordo must believe that an intelligent designer yhwh commands and guides all those collisions.

Imagine how a pretentious dick who is cocksure that he has something important to give to the rest of the world must feel being trapped unheard on a minuscule island in the middle of nowhere. Unavoidably, he just canot understand any island related analogy.

--------------"[...] the type of information we find in living systems is beyond the creative means of purely material processes [...] Who or what is such an ultimate source of information? [...] from a theistic perspective, such an information source would presumably have to be God."

Yet another hysterical rant from KF. You can tell that he desperately wants to ban me or demand an apology.

I half expect him to unban me just so he can have the satisfaction of rebanning me or censoring my comments.

post it so i don't have to go there to read it!

Quote

The design inference is very simple, based on the premise that empirical, inductive explanations of the deep unobserved past or the like, are based on traces we observe and known empirically reliable causes that give rise to the same type of result. So, for instance we know on billions of cases that FSCO/I is a reliable sign of design as key cause. Indeed, the only observed cause, never mind ever so many dubious attempts to cloud the issue. genetic algorithms, from the very statement of a fitness function that points uphill start in a target zone and are chock full of the information built into such. The challenge is to get to such an island of function in a vast sea of configs that quickly exhaust cosmos scale resources without hardly sampling the space of possibilities.

That's the only bit you need to read.

I'm still not sure whether he's thoroughly dishonest or stupidly uncomprehending, or both.

Ineducable, certainly

"The challenge is to get to such an island of function in a vast sea of configs that quickly exhaust cosmos scale resources without hardly sampling the space of possibilities."

So then, according to gordo, it must also be impossible for tiny insects or plant seeds to get to an island thousands of miles out to sea unless they're deliberately sent and guided to that particular island by an intelligent designer yhwh.

ETA:

Think about how big the universe is. What are the odds of meteoroids, asteroids, comets, moons, planets, and/or stars colliding with each other in all that space? Yet it happens, a lot. gordo must believe that an intelligent designer yhwh commands and guides all those collisions.

Imagine how a pretentious dick who is cocksure that he has something important to give to the rest of the world must feel being trapped unheard on a minuscule island in the middle of nowhere. Unavoidably, he just canot understand any island related analogy.

ask him to weigh in on macarthur and wilson LOL

gordon is a prime example of the inverse tard-area relationship

--------------You're obviously illiterate as hell. Peach, bro.-FtK

Finding something hard to believe based on the evidence, is science.-JoeG

Because an unpredictable "designer" might do anything--including minutely patterning its creations as if they'd all evolved, or, as bizarrely, causing them to evolve in some manner without any sort of the leaps possible with actual minds.

For me, it is simply a shaking impact, of a cold probability assessment coming up sadly trumps. (I long ago determined not to fly on the puddle jumpers unless there was compelling, life hazarding level reason. I much prefer the ferry.)

Yes, because of course the annual incidence of death by drowning in ferry-related disaster's in the developing world (or in this case, stuck in the 19th Century world) is much lower than that of death by crash and burn in an airplane.

Another example of KF's legendary ability in the area of probability calculations?

Officials of the UK’s Air Accident Branch arrived in Antigua on Monday to begin investigations she said. Golden said?it was the first time an accident with fatalities happened in Antigua. CEO of Fly Montserrat Capt Nigel Harris, in a statement yesterday, reassured the public the airline operated at the highest standard of a UK-regulated airline.

The statement added: “Fly Montserrat operates to the very high standards of a UK-regulated airline and its regulator, ASSI, who regularly visits to audit the company’s operations, was made aware of the accident on Sunday evening.

--------------Joe: Most criticisims of ID stem from ignorance and jealousy.Joe: As for the authors of the books in the Bible, well the OT was authored by Moses and the NT was authored by various people.Byers: The eskimo would not need hairy hair growth as hair, I say, is for keeping people dry. Not warm.

I am familiar with the terms and concepts.I don't see why the citizens of Montserrat should be gratuitously insulted; especially when some are dealing with the deaths of loved ones in a plane crash. It might be a small and fairly unimportant island, but I haven't seen any evidence that they pay one whit of attention to that poisonous little logorroehic fascist, Mullings. If he was Generalissimo and President-for-Life Gordon the 1st (as you know he is in his sick wank fantasies) then I'd see the point.Not classy.

I am familiar with the terms and concepts.I don't see why the citizens of Montserrat should be gratuitously insulted; especially when some are dealing with the deaths of loved ones in a plane crash. It might be a small and fairly unimportant island, but I haven't seen any evidence that they pay one whit of attention to that poisonous little logorroehic fascist, Mullings. If he was Generalissimo and President-for-Life Gordon the 1st (as you know he is in his sick wank fantasies) then I'd see the point.Not classy.

Fair comment. I'd forgotten about the crash, but reading up-thread its not a good context.

13 Axel October 11, 2012 at 3:44 pmpaV, parts of your post are hilarious. Then I remember that they are actually tragic – if ‘tragedy’ is not too elevated a designation for an endless Soap cum ‘pot-boiler’.

Well, I don't know what crash you are talking about. I don't get the Montserrat news channel and I'll be fucked if I start chasing links to figure out what Gordon's talking about.

Racist... yawn. ID is cargo cult science.

OKSo you didn't read Freddie's post about the fatal aircrash, that you replied to.KF=Montserrat? L'etat, c'est lui????He may be the biggest, most unpleasant git on the island, but then, he's also one of the biggest gits on earth.

Kick that slimy toad (and I'll lend you my boots when yours are worn out). Leave the decent Montserrat people (who have never heard of him) alone.